--- After finishing this post it seems it turned into another wall of text - very sorry about that. One thing I wanted to say before the rest of this post: I talk about how I wasted my life with the internet and games and whatnot - I wanted to make absolutely sure that you guys understand that I'm just talking about my own life. I know how important and helpful(!) that stuff can be for some of you, and I'm certainly not passing judgement on any of you. All this is about my personal life - I used all these distractions to escape my real life to a very unhealthy degree and I
need to change my life. I'm doing that the only way that works for me: by quitting cold turkey. I definitely don't think anyone is a bad person for enjoying those things (I used to love it), but I ignored other, more important, parts of my life completely. Anyway, back to my post.
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Hey all, I'm back. Just for today though, I'm blocking Neogaf and all my other distractions at the end of the day again (I blocked every distracting site a while back to focus on finishing my thesis). Need a bit of a break though.
My birthday was yesterday. Didn't feel up to a party, so I just stayed home to work. Was feeling fine about my decision the day before, but was in a really weird mood the entire time on the day itself, and I'm still feeling very weird now. Just so alone and unimportant to anyone's life. Not having my internet distractions really drives home how alone I am. I take a lot of long walks, up to 3 or 4 hours sometimes. They do help in making me feel more active and I like the idea that I'm working on my health like that - and being outside is definitely better than staying inside all the time. But now that the weather is getting better and I'm seeing all these attractive couples enjoying each others company, while I'm just by myself 95% of the time... It's hard.
So yeah, my birthday. My parents called - they were disappointed I wasn't coming home to celebrate which made me feel extremely guilty, which put me in a horrible mood all this time, but I really couldn't handle all that attention at the moment, which in turn makes me feel incredibly weak. I think they're sensing that I'm not at my happiest right now, but I can also tell that they're incredibly disappointed in how little I've lived my life all these years, and how much of a waste of space I am. They can tell that I'm not up to life in the real world, outside of the cocoon of education, and I have this fear that they're right about that.
Apart from that phone call I received some Facebook messages congratulating me, but all that felt weirdly empty. I know it sounds ungrateful and I don't mean it like that - I'm certainly glad they're taking the effort - but I never see most of those people, and even the closest of those relationships are very shallow. Not their fault at all, but I've been so closed up inside my own head for all these years that I failed to make a real connection with anybody. Loneliness is definitely a big issue in my life right now - I'm working on fixing that (and everything else), but it's hard to know if what you're doing makes sense when there's no one to support you and who knows what's going on with you, I guess.
Anyway: on the positive: I exercise a lot, I'm actively working on my studies/future and I'm trying to find hobbies outside of my comfort zone, although I have very little time for that at the moment. I try to see people 2 or 3 nights a week (the nights where I don't see anyone are very hard honestly). I've redecorated my room again and it actually looks pretty nice after I decided you can still be pretty manly when you've got some flowers around the house

. Also learning to cook healthier, and other stuff like that. I'm doing a lot to end what seemed like an eternal childhood/adolescence. It's definitely time to grow up a bit for me.
I'm a lot more active without all my usual distractions. The realization of how much I wasted my time with all those books/movies/games/internet things over the years if very painful, but it's necessary. I need to be able to do more than just stare at a screen all the time. Life is very stressful now with all the study-stuff going on and preparing to find a job, which isn't going to be easy. I know I'll probably feel better in a couple of weeks when most of this stuff is taken care of. I get very little sleep though - I get a lot of nightmares about everything I've done wrong/am going to do wrong. It's sometimes hard to focus on my work because I'm so stressed out and sad all the time. As always, the mornings are the worst - I usually wake up at 5 from some terrible dream, and I spend a good couple of hours every morning feeling like everything I'm trying to do is pathetic and that I'm always going to be the loser I am now. I'm not even angry anymore, which I used to be (a lot) - I'm just exhausted and sad all the time.
One question: the biggest issue in my life right now (at least, the one that feels like it's out of my control the most) is my appearance. I've talked about this before, but the short version: I already wasn't born as the most attractive guy in the world, but an accident a couple of years back left my face scarred and burned, traces of which are still visible. I know the scars are never going to go away, and I've sort of made peace with that, but my skin is very unhealthy as a result, and I'm hoping to chance that as much as possible. Things that are wrong that hopefully might be slightly fixable: very pale skin (I don't really get any effect from sunlight anymore) with a lot of unhealthy dark and red marks here and there. I also have zombie-like dark (almost purple) rings under my eyes). I've tried stuff in the past of course, but nothing really helped. Of course, the condition of my skin wasn't helped by my terrible lifestyle because I was too scared to go out (which is still an issue, but I've decided I haven't got a choice anymore). What I'm trying to do now - I've bought another product after consulting with a beautician for the area around my eyes. Not sure yet if it'll work, I've only used it for a couple of days. Earlier attempts didn't, so who knows. Also: going out for a walk a couple of hours every day. While sunlight doesn't really affect me, I hope the combination with exercise will at least do something for me.
I know all this seems very vain. I'm very sorry about that, but it's a really big issue for me and it's still the biggest hurdle between me and other people at the moment. I feel that I'm ready to start living my life, but I can't because I can't stop obsessing over how bad I look. It's really bad - if I have to meet someone at the end of the day I can spend the entire day in front of the mirror. I need to get past this somehow. I don't really have a lot of funds to spend on this. I might be willing to share my pictures with someone here (in private, obviously) who could give advice on how to improve my appearance, but I'd have to think about that some more before I'd do something like that.
Anyway, sorry for that wall of text. Don't really have anyone to talk to here. I'll probably go for a walk now, maybe that'll make me feel better. I'll check back in the evening, and after that I'll have to block this site again to stay focused - I can't waste another day like this, lots of work left to do.